


scrapbook

by symphonyine



Series: happy families are all alike [2]
Category: Free!
Genre: Angst, Between Seasons/Series, Family, Gen, Getting Back Together, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post Episode 1.12, lots of babies crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-12
Updated: 2014-08-12
Packaged: 2018-02-12 21:28:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2125260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/symphonyine/pseuds/symphonyine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I thought we were getting better," Haru says. </p><p>(Or: healing is not a consistent progression. Set post-Episode 12 of Season 1, about one or two months later.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	scrapbook

One joint practice, Haru asks, “Rin… you… Do you remember the scrapbook that we …the four of us, we made it in elementary school?” and suddenly Rin is thirteen years old and in Australia again. 

Rin makes a try for laughter, but sounds more like he’s choking. “Yeah, that! I- That was stupid.” _I was stupid._ He turns on his heel as if he’s going to jump back into the pool, and pretends not to hear when Haru tries and fails to start another sentence. _Stupid, stupid, stupid._ “Hey, bet my time’s gotten faster than yours again,” he rushes out loudly over his shoulder, too high-strung and antagonistic to be natural. 

Haru shifts his weight slowly from ankle to ankle, looking uncomfortably torn between a fierce response to challenge, and an unfamiliar mix of concern, confusion, and about-to-blurt-something-embarrassing. Rin’s very familiar with that last one though, and pushes off without waiting. 

It’s not a very good decision, seeing as he’s somewhere between self-loathing laughter and mortified tears, because of course, of course, of course, all his mistakes absolutely must come back to bite him in the butt, and for a moment he almost takes in a lungful of chlorine water on reflex. That slows him down, messes up his first breath, enough for Haru to catch up easily – and then they’re back on familiar ground, nothing but them and the water and swimming. Simple, easy, pure in desire and uncomplicated in agenda. 

They don’t talk about The Scrapbook again for the rest of joint practice, and for today Rin wishes their relationship were nothing but swimming, pure and simple and _clean_. 

*

It’s only much later the next day, walking up the steps towards his mother’s house, that Rin realises he doesn’t actually know what Haru wants with The Scrapbook. He had jumped too quickly to conclusions, and it was stupid to assume that Haru wanted to – wanted to what? See it again? Get rid of it himself? Did Haru know? 

The thirteen-year-old in Australia screams that Haru cannot know, must not know, beats against his heart until Rin is breathless with shame. 

“Rin, dear, are you all right?” 

Rin startles, as if out of dark sleep. His mother is staring at him, tired eyes running over his face. He doesn’t remember when he rang the doorbell, maybe he didn’t and just stood out here so long she finally saw him. Had she been waiting for him? The concern and the questions in her eyes, the worried lines in her face and the weary furrow in her brow – it all makes him want to hide in a corner. 

“I… It’s nothing. I’m home, mom.” 

“Welcome back,” she murmurs quietly, stepping aside to let him through. He shrinks a little inside his jacket, quelling the urge to pull it tighter. It’s late, the windows dark outside, but the lighting inside familiar, yellow and gentle. He puts his bag down in the corridor outside the living room, straightening slowly. 

“I made some herbal soup for you, since you were coming back,” his mom says from behind him. The clink of the keys as they fall onto the table near the door is sharp and high. 

Rin opens his mouth, but can’t find the words, his brain only catching up when she bends down to sling his schoolbag over her shoulder. He takes it back from her gently, rushing to open the door. “Thanks, mom.”

“You didn’t have to,” he only remembers to say later, staring down into the warm gold-brown broth. 

“Nonsense, you need it, what with your swimming team and your studies,” she says briskly, setting aside some dinner – for Gou, assumedly. The Iwatobi team must be training late. “Drink up.” She turns, and catches him staring at the leftovers. “Or did you not have dinner? It’s not good for your health to skip meals, you know.”

Rin looks back at his bowl, and hurriedly spoons up a little. “Course not, ma, I had dinner before I came.” He stares at the spoonful a little too long before drinking it. It’s sweet with a hint of savoury chicken, but the bitter aftertaste overpowers both. 

She snorts. “You ate in school, didn’t you? And what do they feed you there? You’ll be hungry in a while, mark my words. What do you want? I’ll make something for you.”

“It’s okay, mom, I can cook,” Rin shakes his head. “I’ll make something for myself if I get hungry later.”

She frowns, hesitating. Her mouth opens, ready to respond, but then she closes it. She stares at him for a long time, and he focuses on putting spoonful after spoonful of bittersweet broth in his mouth, on the chip on the edge of his bowl, wishing for the burn of her gaze to go away. “It’s all right,” she insists at last, turning back to the counter. “I’ll make something for you. What do you want?”

Rin wants to tell her no. Anything to reduce the attention. “Something hot, please,” he says. “Maybe eggs.” 

That sets her off on a ramble about what counts as sustenance and what doesn’t, how she’ll prepare something more filling for him instead, would you like some fish we have too much in the freezer, no thanks mom, have had too much mackerel for the rest of my life, and talking gets easier after that. When they run out of foodstuffs to talk about, she refills his bowl (she had made a whole pot), and asks about school, and his friends, and he tells her yes, no, it’s okay, it’s great, I’m happy, I’m very glad, how about your work mom, and that sets her off on another ramble, this time about her asshole of a boss and the suck-up at work tattling on everyone else to him. It’s the best distraction so far. At one point her tirade becomes so furious and impassioned that he starts laughing at her in amused affection (they both pretend the delight on her face at the sound isn’t so painful). But eventually there’s nothing left to talk about and the third bowl is too much, he’s staring at half of it left and he doesn’t want to finish it, except his mom took the little time she had to make this for him, and –

“If you can’t finish it, it’s okay,” his mom tells him, and takes the bowl away. 

“But –“

She swats his hand away when he reaches for it back, and puts it on the counter, next to the pot. “You can finish it later,” she says, pulling out a roll of clingwrap from the drawers and sealing the bowl. 

She sits back down opposite him, and Rin wants the bowl back, so that he can have an excuse to not look at her, the family whose calls and messages he has been ignoring for so long, the living parent he can face even less than the dead one. Suddenly the guilt is too much, a ball of barbed wire inside his gut. He looks down at his jacket as she tries to piece together a sentence, a question, and feels as if he might cry if she says anything, the barbed wire reaching up around his throat and tightening. 

There’s the sound of the lock turning, and Gou’s sweet, sweet voice calls, “I’m home!”

His mother gets up to welcome his sister, walks out of the kitchen, and Rin uses the time to wipe the building tears on his sleeves before they become too obvious. He had forgotten that this would happen, had assumed that coming back would be as simple as finding what he was looking for and then taking it and leaving. Like swimming a race, you just get to the pool, swim your heart out, and when your hand slams the wall you either take away a disappointment or you find what you wanted. Simple, clean, easy. 

Unfortunately, relationships can never be like that. 

“Onii-chan, you didn’t tell me you were coming!” 

His mom gives him a look over Gou’s shoulder as they come in, and he doesn’t want to know what it means, not when the burn in his gut is already strong enough substitute for it, not when his shoulders are already stinging from the blows of “Why are you so irresponsible? How could you forget?” and “You’re a terrible brother, a terrible son, a terrible friend, and a terrible person” and the hurt look on Gou’s face. 

Gou throws her arms around his neck, hugging him tightly. “I missed you,” she says, tucking her face against his neck. Rin pulls her closer, standing so Gou doesn’t have to twist her torso awkwardly, and hugs back. 

“Missed you too.”

Their mom kisses their hair, then bustles about, leaving them to their tight embrace as she heats up Gou’s dinner. Rin’s glad Gou doesn’t pull away, letting go only after he does. 

*

Later, when everyone else is asleep, Rin takes a torch and goes into the storeroom. He finds the boxes with all his old things, stacked up neatly by a wall. He knows exactly where The Scrapbook is. It ends up in his hands, again, far too quickly. 

The spine is hard and sharp against his fingers, the covers plunging too abruptly from the edges of the spine – so many of the pages are missing, that the spine is now too thick for the little it has to bind together. Rin holds it carefully, as if to hold on too hard or too rough would cause it to crumble to dust. He feels like he’s holding an ancient artefact, fragile paper records of a time so long ago it had been forgotten. 

His fingers trail delicately along the covers, and his heart aches, with a grief he can’t place. He doesn’t open The Scrapbook, because the pages that are most important aren’t in it. 

They’re carefully compiled in an envelope, where The Scrapbook had been, had been hidden under it. And that’s why Haru can’t know. 

*

The first time Rin approached Haru about making a scrapbook (because he always had to ask Haru more than once for everything back then), he’d done it by passing notes. Many notes. In the middle of class. Even though they were sitting next to each other. Haru had wanted very badly to break something, and it made him angry that he was feeling like that over Rin’s stupid notes, which made him even angrier at Rin. That began an anger compounding cycle, because it made him angry that he was even angry at Rin in the first place, and then he got angry that Rin had gotten him stuck in this stupid annoying anger cycle. 

“Matsuoka, we sit next to each other,” he hissed, not even looking at the note. 

Rin took that as an invitation. “Haru, let’s start a scrapbook!” he said brightly, putting his face too close to Haru’s. He had probably been trying to whisper, but everything about Rin was loud, loud, loud, like that annoyingly bright smile on his face and the expectant look in his eyes. He was waiting for Haru to respond, foot tapping annoyingly against the leg of his chair. The legs of their chairs were so close together that Haru felt every annoying thud caused by Rin’s impatient kicking. 

Haru considered ignoring Rin. 

“Haru, come on, Haru, what do you think? It’ll be so great, we can record all the important things that happen and all our precious memories – and then when we’re older we can look at it and remember! It’ll be just like in the movies, come on Haru, what’dya think!”

Ignoring Rin hadn’t worked very well before – that Haru was on Rin’s relay team now and had let Rin get close enough to whisper in his _ear_ about stupid scrapbooks proved that. 

“No.” Haru put as much force and resolution and _warning_ as he could into the single syllable. 

Rin pulled back, huffing and distinctly pouting. “Why,” he demanded. He tried to catch Haru’s eye, the scowl-pout only growing when Haru determinedly focused on his math worksheet. “Haru, don’t you want to have a _memento_ of our time together?” 

Haru turned his head slowly. “Why,” he demanded back flatly. “What’s the point.” Rin brightened, and Haru knew he was about to launch into a Very Long and Emotional Explanation. To emphasise the finality of his decision, he snatched back Rin’s stupid note, looked Rin in the eye, and tore it slowly. 

“Uh, guys…” 

Makoto went ignored, as Rin declared war on Haru’s worksheets. Haru retaliated with erasers. 

“Matsuoka, leave my worksheets alone!”

“Stop erasing my friendship! I’m just trying to talk to you!”

“This isn’t friendship! Stop it! You’re talking to me fine without _vandalising_ my worksheets!”

“Guys… Um, I think a scrapbook is a great idea!”

Rin straightened. “I agree with Makoto! Thanks, Makoto,” he (attempted to) whisper gratefully over Haru’s head.

Haru gritted his teeth, glaring down at his equations. _Makoto._ “No,” Haru said firmly. 

*

“Let’s put the chocolate wrapper in!”

“It’s going to get sticky and ants will come.”

“I’m sure we can wash it and then tape it in after,” Makoto laughed placatingly. 

“Why do you want to stick a chocolate wrapper in our scrapbook anyway?” Haru asked, frustrated and disbelieving, and disbelieving that he was frustrated and frustrated at his disbelief, and frustrated at all of this, and really by this point Haru wasn’t even sure which feelings were feeding into which anymore. 

“Why not?” 

“That’s not an answer!” 

Haru had eventually caved, in a repeat of what was becoming a very unpleasant pattern, and now they were not only making a scrapbook, they were arguing over whether or not to include the wrapper of the chocolate bar he and Rin had shared at lunch. Haru hadn’t shared that willingly – it had been Makoto’s _brilliant_ idea, although it reeked a little of Aki too. 

“Haru, Rin, uh… please stop fighting. Aki had an extra chocolate bar – why don’t you share it and make up?” 

“Hey, Haru, bet I can make my half last longer than yours!”

Because it was Makoto, and Aki, and Rin, it had ended in disaster. 

And now – 

“This is an important memory! It’s how our scrapbook started!” Rin insisted, and Haru gave up. Took a deep breath, and gave up. 

“Haru, are you okay?” Makoto asked worriedly.

“Yes. No,” Haru snapped. All Haru wanted to do was swim, not make stupid scrapbooks. “What are we going to do with this _scrapbook_?”

*

“Haru?” 

Haru jerks back into reality, almost out of a dream. 

Makoto, Nagisa, and Rei are staring at him, all with varying looks of concern on their faces. They’re in the changing rooms, towelling off after joint practice. “Haru-chan, Rei-chan was asking you a question, and you didn’t say anything. Are you all right?” Nagisa bounds up, putting his face too close to Haru’s. 

“No…” Haru runs the tip of his tongue over his teeth, and is grateful that they wait. “Makoto, Nagisa. Do you remember our scrapbook? The one we made in elementary school.”

Nagisa brightens. “Ah! Rin-chan took it with him, didn’t he! Oh, Rei-chan, Haru-chan Mako-chan, we should start a scrapbook for our team too!” 

“Is that so…” Rei muses thoughtfully, and Makoto joins in in agreement. 

“No,” Haru says. “I meant… Do you think Rin still has it?”

The other three blink at him, and then each other. “Why not, Haru-chan? It was Rin-chan’s idea after all!”

“Haruka-senpai, did something happen during practice?”

“I…” Haru twists his towel in his hands. There are so many questions he wants to ask. But the person he wants to ask them to isn’t here, and he doesn’t know which question to ask. “I thought we were getting better,” Haru finishes lamely. 

“What happened, Haruka-senpai?” Rei asks again. 

“I asked Rin about the scrapbook. I thought that, since it was his idea… but he wouldn’t answer.” Haru folds the towel up, places it neatly in his bag. 

Behind him, he knows the other three are exchanging looks. He waits patiently. 

Rei speaks first. He pushes up his glasses, saying, “Well, clearly the only solution is to ask Rin-san about this – as always. Why is this always the case with you two?”

“But what if –“ Haru cuts himself off. Nods. “Maybe tomorrow.” It’s Saturday tomorrow. Rin shouldn’t have any reason not to see him. 

“No maybes about it, Haruka-senpai,” Rei says determinedly. Next to him, Nagisa nods vigourously, with emphatic sound effects added. 

“Will you be okay on your own?” Makoto offers gently. 

Haru considers, allows himself to contemplate accepting the safety and familiarity of Makoto’s company. 

“No, it’s okay,” he says. 

*

On Monday, Haru is in Samezuka. He’s skipping school again, but that’s not as important. 

Rin looks ill as he walks out of Samezuka’s swimming complex, his fists clenching the cloth of his jacket. “Don’t you have school?”

“Rin… About joint practice…”

Rin’s face clears. “If you wanted to swim you could’ve just said. Or used the pool in your school,” he says, a bemused eyebrow raised. 

Haru almost caves. Swimming is easy. Swimming is simple and uncomplicated. “No… I meant to ask… You… Do you still have the scrapbook we made?”

Rin laughs, rubbing the back of his neck and looking skyward. “Yeah, but not right now though, not here.”

“Oh,” Haru pauses, mulls this over. That was easier than expected. “Can I see it?”

Rin’s eyes widen, and he takes a step back. His back hits the wall. “No! I, that is,” he trails off, and Haru’s heart sinks. 

“I was thinking that… Since we’re older now, that’d be what you wanted,” he mutters. 

“I-It’s not,” Rin says savagely, and Haru takes that as his cue. 

“All right. Sorry,” he says. “I’ll… go back to school.”

“Yeah. Yes. You shouldn’t be skipping class,” Rin reproaches him. 

Haru wants to… Haru doesn’t know what he wants. Except for the encroaching, familiar darkness to go away again. 

*

Rin had only ever mentioned his mother in passing in elementary school. Haru can barely remember the few times Rin had spoken about her, much less what it had been about. Rin had been careless, thoughtless, casual in his regard, but Haru isn’t sure if his distrust of that impression was because he had discounted everything Rin said and did as a front back then, or because memory was unreliable. In any case, it had never concerned him before. 

Standing on the steps leading up to the front door, waiting as Gou gets out her keys, Haru is a little bit curious, and wishes he’d asked even a little. 

“My mom’s not home yet, but I don’t think she’ll mind if you stick around for dinner,” Gou says over her shoulder, as Haru steps across the threshold. 

Haru thanks Gou, looking over the inside of the house. The carpet beneath his feet is old and faded, the rough threads cushioning his toes. There’s a clean fragrance in the air, and Haru spies a diffuser (lemon lavender) on the small side-table near the door, pale white against the dark, dusty brown of the walls. The scent feels young and fresh, pure in the tired, musty house. Haru thinks it’s fitting, somehow. 

Gou has already disappeared, and Haru follows her footsteps. His heart beats faster, louder, and the tips of his fingers are beginning to dampen. In the emptiness and silence of this old house, everything seems to close in, and distantly Haru wonders why every step makes his ankles weak. The thick, sad-sweet smell of old wood, the thin filtering of pale sunlight against burgeoning dark shadows in every corner – Rin’s home carries too much burden in its heart. 

Gou is rummaging in what appears to be a storeroom. “Ah, Haruka-senpai, these boxes are all Onii-chan’s stuff. I’m not sure which one your scrapbook is in though…” she says, head disappearing into a box the size of her torso, hands carefully removing all kinds of things as she scoured Rin’s possessions. 

Haru kneels next to her, and sets to work. The uncertainty and fear have had five days to build up, and he’s glad to be finally resolving it. Doing this feels invasive, but Haru can’t stand by passively anymore. The last time he’d let Rin hide himself, he’d lost him twice, and almost a third time again. If Rin couldn’t communicate, then Haru would have to find other means. Out of solutions, he’d turned to Gou, who, ever-practical, said Haru should just visit their home and find the scrapbook himself, and everything would come out. 

At the bottom of the second box he gets his hands on, Haru finds the scrapbook. The moment he picks it up, he knows something is wrong. 

It’s too thin. Haru’s stomach plunges faster than the covers from the edge of the binding. His fingers are trembling, and he thinks that Rin would get mad that he’s probably leaving sweaty fingerprints all over the covers. 

He opens the scrapbook, and is affirmed. The few pages left within contain childish scrawls from Makoto – the sakura tree, the bricks, some flowers and birds, a quarter-circle in the corner for a sun, well-wishes for Australia, little representations of sleepovers and school lunch picnics – and bright doodles from Nagisa, endearing in spite of the plethora of colours becoming an eyesore. Nagisa has drawn them as adults on one page, before the relay, and taped in a tiny snack token Rin had given him. “FRIENDS FOREVER”, he had written, and then in brackets below “I don’t want to ever forget!”. 

That’s all. Every page Rin has ever written on – every page Haru has ever written on has been torn out. 

Haru is aware his shoulders are shaking. His breaths are coming a little too quickly. He runs a finger over the uneven edges left behind by the shorn pages. 

“Haruka-senpai? Haruka-senpai! What’s wrong?” Gou rushes to his side, and falls silent when she sees. “Is it. Maybe it was an accident?”

“Too many pages to be an accident.” 

“Well, maybe they just fell out!” Gou suggests brightly, turning to the box. There’s nothing else in it – The Scrapbook was the only thing at the bottom. She turns back to him. “Don’t worry Haruka-senpai, I’m sure – I’m sure you can start a new one!” She stops, staring at his face. And then she picks herself up and runs out of the storeroom. Haru wonders why, but lets her go. 

This is too much. Haru cradles the mutilated book, the childish memories, now with a gaping hole in them. He is fully aware he’s being irrational. This must have happened a while ago. The present Rin has accepted him back into his life. There is no cause for anguish. 

It’s still unpleasant to realise that – if Rin so wanted, he might tear Haru out of his life again, page by page, until all that was left was tiny jagged edges that spoke only of emptiness and nothing of Haru, and Haru wouldn’t be able to stop him. That Rin had even done this in the first place, when all Haru had been able to do then was watch him run into the dark and ache to scream for him to come back, hurts like fire in his chest, in his throat, in his eyes. 

A tissue box is thrust into his face, and Haru looks up to see Gou’s worried face. A tear runs down his cheek, and that’s when he realises he’d been crying. 

He takes one, and says, “I should go.”

Gou makes as if to say something, to stop him, but lets him go. Haru is grateful. He tucks the scrapbook gently into his bag, cushions it between a textbook and a file. It’s suffered too much. 

He bumps into Rin’s mother on the way out, returning from work. He gives her a cursory greeting, and pushes past before she can say anything. 

*

On the way home, for the second time in the same week, Rin stops by a grocery. 

He doesn’t know why, has no real objective here. It’s just a misplaced sense of obligation, to return the favour of the herbal soup last Saturday. He realises, browsing through the shelves, squinting in the over-bright fluorescent lighting, that he has no idea what his mother might want or need. It’s with a sinking feeling that he thinks this emptiness, this gaping hole, is mutual. 

It’s getting late, so eventually Rin just grabs a loaf of bread, and on impulse, some fresh vegetables, a tub of ice-cream, a bit of blue cheese, and a jar of peanut butter. He’s over-doing it, but if he spends any more time dallying here, he’ll get home too late. It’s a Friday too, his mom will be tired from a week of work and he doesn’t want to reach home only after she’s asleep. 

He feels heavy, so heavy, and so tired. He thought he’d been getting better, but ever since joint practice last Friday – has it only been a week? – any such illusions are gone. Gotten better? He wants to laugh. The shame and guilt from The Scrapbook, from visiting his mom again, have dug a hole and cloaked him in fear. One reminder of a past mistake was all it took to push him back into that self-feeding cycle once again. In a pathetic way, it was kind of funny. 

At the door, his mother greets him with an edge in her voice and eyes that Rin can’t place, and his hackles rise instantly. 

_It’s nothing,_ he tells himself. 

“You didn’t have to buy groceries,” she laughs when she sees the bags in his hands, and Rin’s face warms. 

“Nah, I was… There were…” She nods, and he stops trying to find an excuse. 

“Your friend was here today,” she tells him as they walk into the kitchen. “Haruka. He left looking very upset, maybe you should call him.”

Rin freezes. “M- Maybe later,” he chokes out. Then he thinks over what she said again. “Why was Haru here?” 

“Gou says he came looking for a scrapbook you made together,” she says, as she begins preparing dinner. Rin puts the groceries he bought on the counter, and helps her with washing the ingredients. 

“Oh.” Rin swallows, wets his lips. Before he can say anything more, his mother takes the knife and cutting board from him. 

“Sit down, I’ll do the cooking,” she says without looking at him, setting quickly to work at dicing. Rin reaches for the tools back. 

“No, mom, it’s okay, I know how to cut vegetables. You’re tired from work-“

She shoulders him aside, shaking her head, hands only pausing once. “And what about you? You’ve had school. You look tired, why don’t you go sit in the living room?”

“Mom, I’m not a kid anymore. You don’t need to baby me. Why can’t you let me do this?” Rin asks, frustrated. He pulls the knife back with too much force, and cuts the back of his hand. Everything halts, the room seeming to stiffen into stone, and they wait, breaths held like the dead, as the first red pricks seep out. 

So much for not being a kid anymore. 

His mom recovers first. “Wait here,” she says, pries her eyes away from the blood and dashes out of the kitchen. 

Rin follows, the sting of the shallow cut barely registering. “No mom, it’s fine, I can take care of myself! It’s just a small cut! Mom!”

She already has the first aid kit out, turning over its contents frantically, all kinds of bandaids and creams tumbling over each other in a cacophony of chaos. “Where’s the antiseptic, antiseptic, gauze,” she’s muttering, and Rin falls to his knees next to her, tries to sift through the mess. 

“Mom, look, it’s all right, don’t bother yourself, just go back to your cooking, I’ll take care of this myself!” His voice raises at the end into a shout, an unsettling bolt followed by equally unsettling silence. The faint smell of blood is dirty against the cool scent of lemon lavender. 

“Like you’ve been taking care of yourself all these years?” she says at last, and Rin lets go of the wrist he hadn’t realised he’d grabbed. “You haven’t let me cook for you in a long time, Rin, much longer than you’ve stopped telling me about you. That’s a very long time,” she reproaches, eyes running over his face, almost as if if she looked at him long enough, she would finally learn all the secrets of a son who had, however unintentionally, cut her off even when they were still living in the same house, desperately chasing after the ghost of her husband. Her hand brushes his bangs over an ear, and the weight of her gaze becomes too heavy to bear, like the weight of too much water crushing his chest. Rin looks away. “It’s a mother’s job to take care of her children. But the one taking care of you is you. I haven’t been able to protect and support you when you needed it. All I do is earn the money that feeds you. I can’t take care of you in any other way, yet even this much you deny me.” Her voice cracks. 

“I’m sorry, ma,” Rin croaks out, hot tears falling unbidden. “I – I don’t want to trouble you.”

“Why would you be a trouble to me?” she asks, mystified. 

Rin chews his lip, running a finger over the bleeding cut on his hand. The words lodge in his throat, knowing if they take a flying leap out, he will lose all control. “I – I was afraid,” and the words feel like he’s taking a knife to his own lifeline. “I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to know,” he says, because it’s true.

“Afraid of what?” His mom sits closer, and he resists the urge to shift away. 

“I was just – afraid that – I was afraid you’d be disappointed in me!” and he’s horrified to find it comes out in a raw sob. He takes a deep breath, and every shaky word makes his jaw tremble, his hands clenching and the blood oozing out faster. “And I didn’t want you to know. I mean,” he tries to calm down, but his breath catches in a childish gasp, “I’d gone off to another town and then another country just like that, I thought, I knew you’d be expecting great things of me, but then I – I couldn’t do it,” he chokes out, voice small, and then suddenly the flow couldn’t be stopped anymore, rising in volume and pouring out too fast, “I thought you’d be mad at me, because you worked so hard to send me places just so I could fulfil dad’s dream, and I couldn’t even do that much, all I was doing was wasting time and money, and I failed,” by this point his voice is getting embarrassingly high, “and I couldn’t do it! I was so afraid! Every time you called I just wanted to hide, I read all your mail but I was – I was paralysed at the thought of telling you anything, I was so afraid you’d – hate me –“ And he stops trying, just lets the words out in an shrill cry of hysteria, in between harsh, tear-clogged gasps, “After all you’d done, I thought you’d be – so mad, and so I – I never wanted to tell you, when I was – I was just holding it in, be – because – because I thought you woul- wouldn’t understand, I just couldn’t do it, I was afraid you’d be disappointed in me, I was afraid of letting you know how awful I’d been,” and it’s not a week’s worth of dark churning water finally releasing, it’s years and years of terror and denial, and suddenly he’s wrapped in comfort and safety he hasn’t felt since before Australia, and his mom is murmuring something in his ear. 

“It’s all right,” she shushes him. “I would never hate you, understand?” she murmurs fiercely, stroking his hair. Her fingers are so gentle, and they make him cry harder, curling deeper into her arms. “It doesn’t matter how much you do wrong, I’m not going to stop loving you, all right? It’s okay to not be okay, Rin. Don’t shut me out again, okay? Okay?” 

Rin nods, hiccupping roughly. He’s still trembling, and he doesn’t trust himself to speak again without screaming. 

“All right, then let’s get this cut cleaned up, and finish the cooking. And this time,” she says, mock-scolding, brandishing the tube of antiseptic, “I’ll do the taking care of, and you just sit there.” Rin laughs, still half-sobbing, and then they both giggle quietly, relief and release mingling and feeding into each other. 

*

On the last page of their scrapbook, Haru had requested to tape in a picture of a waterfall. 

Haru had done a lot of weird things in that scrapbook. He had somehow procured a sheet of mackerel stickers, and there were many pages where the only mark Haru left was a mackerel sticker or two in the corner. Somehow Rin thought that was meant to spite him, since Haru had never liked the idea of one to begin with, much in the way Haru would sardonically address him as “Rinrin” or “Leader” to embarrass him. 

Honestly, the scrapbook had eventually ended up as more of a drawing book. None of them, save for Haru, had been particularly good at crafts. Rin tried to pretty it up, to really make it something worth keeping and remembering, but Makoto and Nagisa had just gone simple and drawn and written whatever they wanted. Nagisa would clumsily tape some things in occasionally, and that was the most craft he engaged in; meanwhile you could see Makoto’s handiwork in the page that Rin and Haru had ripped once while arguing over marker colour combinations – the edges weren’t lined up perfectly, because Makoto had been sitting next to Rin and Haru and they had still been fighting, and he botched the job. 

The pages Haru had done though – he was the only one with the artistic sense to use the ribbons and buttons and patterned tapes to pleasant effect, the one with the hands and fingers to cut and trim and sketch. 

In the months after the race, Rin had found the scrapbook again, among his belongings in Australia. He’d brought it with him, for it was the most precious memento he had of his team that wasn’t buried in a box underground, or in a picture frame in a clubhouse, this scrapbook he had intended to be only for him and Haru, but which Makoto and Nagisa and found their way into as well, friends he never wanted to forget. 

He had opened it, looked at every page Haru had ever written on, everything said and not said, and felt the furious tears build up. Drowning in the sting of defeat, the shame of stupidity, the self-loathing for incompetence, and worst of all, the fear of failure – in anger he had torn every single page out, raging and crying, had taken vicious pleasure in taking it out on every sheet of Haru’s beautiful handiwork, every hint of that unreachable superiority a needle, too small to seriously injure, but too many to withstand.

Only later, after he was done wallowing in self-pity, his tears run dry and his well emptied, had gathered himself and uncurled from his shell in the darkest corner of his room, did Rin slowly collect the pieces of their time together. It was worse now. Now there was horror, and shame, and guilt, to pile on top of everything else. Fingers trembling, he’d put them in a binder, and shipped them back home with the scrapbook at the next opportunity. 

*

In the ocean, everything is simpler. 

The fear, the pain, the denial, all of it is still real – but out here in the open waters, they’re a bit further away. Distantly Haru knows he’s falling back into old, unhelpful ways, but this is familiar and this is easy and Haru may have made the decision to choose the harder, better path, but for now, he doesn’t want to fight anymore. It’s tiring. 

The sun is setting now, but it’s too bright, too warm. It reminds him of Rin’s hair, and he feels sick. He sinks into the water, because it’s just so easy. Why resist the lure of nothingness? Sleep is good, unconsciousness is good, darkness and emptiness are welcome, anything better than this sickness. He’d been under for so long, and now he’s relinquishing the surface again. 

_I’m being childish._ But Haru stops thinking, and closes his eyes. 

It doesn’t matter how good at swimming Haru is. He never forgets the danger waiting if he takes a breath while under. There is no sustainable life for him here. All he can do is see how long he can last before it’s either death or another breath again. 

Holding a breath underwater is a bit like balancing on the edge of a precipice, between the knowledge that the surface is within reach, and the instinctive fear of drowning. In the strain of his lungs and the impassiveness of the dark waters, Haru disappears. 

In between short bursts of his front crawl along the coastline, he lets himself float, away from the shore, further and further, but the danger seems to have the counter effect of soothing his racing heart. Eventually, he stops swimming altogether. 

*

Rin hadn’t thought to bring a swimsuit, which was the stupidest thing, because he should have seen this coming. 

He finds Haru as a distant speck in the horizon, bobbing like driftwood on the golden surface of the water, might have missed him entirely on his way to Haru’s house. He’d forgotten about Haru coming over, until Gou had come back, and told him everything – and now he had to set things right. 

Shucking off his jacket and shirt, Rin stows them under a bench with his bag. He moves Haru’s things there too – the idiot had just left them in the open. Hell, someone might have already stolen something. 

The clamouring in his heart grows with every stroke – is Haru moving further away? – and the tremble in his jaw from the earlier breakdown with his mother is still there. When he’s near enough that he thinks Haru can hear, Rin calls out. “Haru!” Haru doesn’t respond, and Rin continues. “Haru, Haru, please!”

Haru finally reacts. He gives a start, almost as if waking up from a trance. He does his own version of graceless floundering, that is to say it’s not really graceless at all. He recovers with ease, but the look on his face when he turns to see Rin is jarringly child-like. 

“Rin?” he exclaims, almost fearful – no, hopeful? Both?

Rin ploughs the last few metres to Haru’s side, until they’re treading water next to each other, and the tremble in Rin’s jaw is almost painful now, hindering his speech and making him stammer. “I’m sorry,” he begins. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think.” _Story of my life._ Haru looks like he still doesn’t understand, and Rin says further, “I guess you know already - Gou said you saw it for yourself. I – Haru, I’m sorry, I was…” He struggles for words, shame urging him to lie, but logic and common sense attempting to galvanise him to courage. The silence between him and Haru stretches, the dim ember dusk on his face and the patiently undulating waves too distracting. Rin wants to scream. 

Haru is waiting, and he’s holding his breath, and for a moment he looks like he’s about to say something awful, and that’s the push Rin needs. “I’m ashamed of myself, I’m so sorry, please don’t blame yourself. The scrapbook – that’s all my fault, my idea, my stupidity. When I tore your pages out I told myself I was mad at you, but really I was maddest at me, and – Haru, I kept them. I have them, I still have them, I couldn’t ever, ever, Haru, throw them away. I kept the pages, so please…” Rin watches Haru’s face anxiously, yearning to know what Haru is thinking. 

Haru’s eyes are wide, but he’s not saying anything, and Rin has to know. “Haru, I’m sorry I got caught up in my own self-pity, I’m so sorry, I never considered that you would – “

Haru loops his wrists around Rin’s neck, and hugs him slowly, tentatively. He’s laughing, just a little. “I’m glad,” he says, and Rin’s relief is overpowering. “Not – not about,” Haru corrects himself. “Don’t hate yourself,” he orders at last, “I think it’s okay. We’re okay. I just didn’t know, that’s all.”

Rin snorts, frowning in confusion. “How can you say we’re okay? I made you cry – Haru, are you crying again?” He pulls his face away slightly, not breaking the embrace. Haru shrugs, and Rin envies his lack of shame. “How can you say we’re okay like this? Everything’s in a mess and we keep making things more complicated for each other. Sometimes I wish we could just swim and forget everything else,” Rin confesses, the words slipping out like criminals from a crime scene. 

Where Rin can’t see, his chin resting on Rin’s shoulder, Haru frowns unhappily. “Why,” he says, almost petulant. “This is okay too.”

“You’re upset!” Rin tries to push Haru away, so he can look him in the eye. “And I’ve been upset the whole week! It’s like all we do is get worse.”

Haru nods. “Maybe. But – Rei said something that makes sense.” Rin scoffs, but listens. “He said that – relationships are like growing crops.”

“Where have I heard that one before? Speedo Megane, really…”

“Sometimes the rain is too heavy, but there’s always a harvest because of the rain,” Haru says solemnly. And then, “Your hair looks nice in the sunset.”

“What?”

Haru kisses him on the lips, soft and lingering, their ankles colliding painfully they come too close. He rests his forehead against Rin’s, eyes closed, oblivious as Rin’s entire world begins to rearrange itself. “Haru, what?”

“Stay out here with me a while more,” Haru asks. 

“It’s getting late, Haru,” Rin says on reflex, his thoughts a jumble. 

“It’s calming,” Haru offers, and unloops his hands, returns to floating on the sea. 

After a moment, Rin acquiesces. “You’re going to float all the way out to Australia,” he grumbles nonsensically, mimicking Haru’s posture. 

“I’ll make sure to come back as soon as I can, and challenge you to a race,” Haru murmurs. 

“Shut up,” Rin tells him without bite, realigning Haru and taking his hand, so they wouldn’t lose each other. 

It is indeed calming, Rin finds, floating on the sea. There is no need for unnecessary thought or emotion, only the timeless ebb and flow of the ocean and the receding glow of the setting sun. It’s been a tiring week, a tiring few years, and it feels comforting to hide, to escape into the vastness and become part of its nothingness. For all that Rin had scoffed, he thinks – hopes, that Rei was right, that after the sun sets and night falls, morning will come again tomorrow, and that winter must eventually pave the way to summer, that even if the moon sets the sun will rise, that where darkness is somewhere there must also be light, that above endless water must be a surface he can push through to find air again. 

But for now, he’s just going to disappear. Let the exhaustion swallow him up, remove his will to swim forward. He can figure out everything later – he thinks that’s what Haru intends to do too. Haru looks as tired as Rin feels, and Rin realises he never thought to ask exactly how Haru had spent the past three years. 

Questions later; be sad now. It’s better than before, because now he’s not alone. 

*

EPILOGUE

“Ohh, Ai-chan, you wrote a whole essay!” Nagisa says, eyes wide in awe. 

Nitori puffs up his chest, chin raised proudly. “Yes, it’s a three-page essay of my year with Matsuoka-senpai! I wrote all about the time we spent together, how Matsuoka-senpai would share food with me sometimes, but yell at me for leaving snack wrappers around our room more often than not, and-“

“Wow, Yamazaki-kun, your math is really good,” Makoto marvels, as he takes the book from Nagisa. “Nice curves,” he compliments Sousuke, admiring the many graphs and neatly printed rows of calculus. 

Sousuke hums his acknowledgement. “If you flip the page, you’ll find my thesis on Rin’s reality-bending abilities.”

Rei splutters. “Rin-san can bend reality?!”

Sousuke turns to Rei and gives him one of his trademark dead-eyed judgy stares, radiating cool condescension. Rin feels a bit sorry for Rei because he knows that expression means Sousuke is laughing himself silly inside, but Rei doesn’t know that. “Of course, how else do you explain this ratio?” He grabs the scrapbook, flips to a well-thumbed page, where a score is being kept. The current tally is “Rin: 534, Sousuke: 0” and the header reads “Rock-Paper-Scissors”. Below it, another table goes “Sousuke’s douchebag levels”, and it’s being updated almost every day with tiny bar graphs and percentages that are clearly Rin’s work, accompanied by gleeful emoji and snarky comments in Sousuke’s graceful handwriting. 

Nagisa bursts out laughing, and doesn’t stop. “Oh- Rei-chan, oh, haha, HA! Mako-chan, Haru-chan, ehe, HEE, let’s start a scrapbo- book, TOO! It-“ Nagisa breaks off, practically crumpling to the floor as he clutches his stomach. He looks like he’s about to keel over. “It looks like so much fun!”

Rei is reading Sousuke’s thesis, occasionally referring to the math Sousuke has used to map out Rin’s purported reality-bending abilities. “Yamazaki-san, I really don’t think Rin-san caused the Big Bang.”

Momotarou springs up into Rei’s vision from where he had been sort-of-not-really-kind-of-maybe harassing Gou and Haru with softcopies of all the selfies he’d taken and pasted into the Samezuka team’s scrapbook (they all look demonic and also the same, with many ridiculous looking filters, backgrounds, frames, and special effects; Rin looks murderous in every one he appears in). “OF COURSE Rin-senpai caused the Big Bang, Yamazaki-senpai DID THE MATH, it’s RIGHT HERE, Rin-senpai is the cause of EVERY COOL THING that has EVER happened, Rin-senpai –“

Rin covers his face, half-groaning, half-sobbing. “My team is a meme,” he realises in horror. “This isn’t even a scrapbook, it’s just a collection of material intended to do nothing but annoy me. _They don’t even care about presentation_ ,” Rin moans. “ _There are no aesthetics to speak of_ , how can they still call it a scrapbook.”

Next to him, Haru laughs. “Are you forgetting when Nagisa drew ten penguins on top of your team manifesto?” 

Rin makes an offended noise. “I tried to make that look really good too!”

“It’s the thought that counts.”

Rin huffs. “Whatever, what about our scrapbook, huh? You haven’t written a damn thing in ages!” 

Haru scowls. “Which one of us has been hoarding it? It’s supposed to be ours but you just keep it in Samezuka. Have you been showing it around?”

A shadow looms over the both of them. “Yes,” Sousuke says, and Rin knows what that soulless expression means, it means he’s going to punch Sousuke’s lights out. “I’ve taken videos of him talking about it. It’s as if he found a way to speak without breathing – probable, given his reality-bending abilities. Want to see?”

END

**Author's Note:**

> This was initially written for some HS!-era scrapbook headcanons Beti (tumblr user betinetine) and I came up with, but then it exploded into this angst monster. It was intended to just be happy elementary-age babies and cuddle fluff with their teenaged selves, but real life got in the way. 
> 
> Honestly, at some point, this fic just turned into me using the Free! boys as a voicebox. I've been having a really rough time. A rough few years, but especially the past few weeks. I haven't gone more than a day without crying from how stressed and awful I feel, and I'm miserable all the time. I needed to hear that it was okay to not be okay. I needed to say how I really felt. Because real life couldn't offer me either of these things, I wrote something for myself. I've lost track of where the Free! boys began and my over-identification and projection ended, so I'm really not sure if my characterisation is exactly on point. If at any time any one seems out of character, well, that's me speaking then. 
> 
> There was supposed to be two long fluff-fest cuddle scenes between the ocean-kiss-resolution scene and the epilogue, but I'm just not in the right frame of mind to write happy cuddly RinHaru commiserating and huddling close under blankets and bumping noses and shopping for scrapbooking materials to start a new book. Maybe when I'm in a happier place, I'll add that in. Or someone who's already in a happier place can write it instead, god knows anyone else would do a better job of that.


End file.
